


Love is a Word Like Any Other

by OwnThyself



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-18 23:33:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11885187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/pseuds/OwnThyself
Summary: Keith and Pidge contemplate loss on the bridge.





	1. Right Arm Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarkAstarte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/gifts).



> This fic will explore + involve consensual underage sex in future chapters.  
> Please treat this a trigger warning if needed. Don't hesitate to take care of yourself in fandom, and outside of it.

The truth is, Keith has been rehearsing the lie from before the beginning. He thinks it's best to have an exit strategy, especially from something you have no desire to escape.

This is the list of his most important lies, the ones that predate Shiro:

Home is home wherever you make it.  
It didn't matter, being thrown out of Galaxy Garrison.  
Orphan is a word like any other.

Keith leaves the training deck, vibrating with the thrum of machinery, tense from the sizzle and digital shatter of training bots. Before he goes, he stacks the bots in a pile of dislocated limbs and caved-in torsos, watches them buckle under their dead mechanical weight. There isn't a part of him that doesn't hurt, as though his joints have been worried all through the night by invisible, dexterous fingerblades, as if every time sleep comes for him, it takes something else he can't fix when he wakes. Training, hard and then harder, brings no focus, no satisfaction or relief. He can't fight himself into a stupor. Worse, he can't even fight himself into a rage.

He's tired of fighting without killing.

He passes no other paladins, no Alteans, no mice, on his way to the bridge. The Castle is silent, as quiet as any living thing can be when it's holding its breath. The skies outside are dark and clear. He doesn't know if it's night or day. He can't remember when last he thought to measure the time by any metric more demanding, more simple, than

Shiro's lost.  
Shiro must be found.

No one's thought to ask Keith how he knows. He figures he'd lie about that, too, if it comes to it. Lance has been sympathetic, which is shocking and unwelcome, like a rash Keith can't quite reach around his back to scrape off. Hunk has offered him cookies made with contraband, black-market blackstrap molasses. They were good cookies. Keith only ate them because he imagined Shiro sneaking one from the tray, secreting it to his quarters to nibble over stolen Galran archives. Know thy enemy, with something sweet in the mouth, for the inevitable bitterness. Keith thinks of dusting stray crumbs off Shiro's bare chest. No one would suspect Shiro nibbles cookies, either, but the truth is the man's got a delicate mouth. Something can be delicate without being soft. It bruises just like it relents: with pressure and insistence, with the application of heat and force.

He doesn't trust the sectors he's already looked. A body thrown into space could be hiding in plain sight. A man, torn from his moorings like that, might observe his own orbit, respecting no other gravitational pull. This sounds like nursery rhymes, but you gotta consider the man we're talking about, here. You got to leave some room, leave some vast, fucking room, for whatever you think other, normal men can do, then remind yourself of the space Shiro occupies. Big enough. Titanic enough to be worth any lie. And lie Keith will. It's the closest he can come to a vow.

He realizes he's been talking to himself. He doesn't remember the full walk from the training deck to the bridge, but suddenly he's there. Like he glitched and reappeared on the map, an untrustworthy star. A stammering piece of sniper tech with a faulty, fucked-up scope. He realizes, too, that he's not alone.

Pidge looks up from the screen, pale blue and blinking with triangulations, sequences and plans he can barely parse. He sees a list of the sectors they last searched for Shiro before she swipes the screen clean, hiding her work.

She's the only one who hasn't offered Keith any comfort, cold or otherwise. No pep talks in the corridors. No heart-to-hearts over sparring sessions. No cookies or condolences. He hasn't offered her any, either.

The smallest mouse emerges from behind Pidge's sleeve, nuzzling her sympathetically. He watches her scoop the thing, press it close to her heart, ignoring him.

Inexplicably, Keith thinks of the Balmera, the one they've met and the countless others slow-roaming the universe, grazing on patience and calcification. He sees Pidge pet the blue mouse, sees her set it gently down as it scurries towards Allura's chambers. Her hands close around nothing, venn-diagramming emptiness intersecting void.

Loss is a subsection of greater loss, he thinks. Like splitting up a family in increments, taking siblings first in the dead of night, then a mother by a well, then a father, when you think you've shut the cellar door and surely, the world's gonna let you have one person, one pair of hands to hold before sleep comes to steal the bread from your mouth. Keith doesn't know what he trusts less, rest or relatives. The Balmera doesn't get either, growing crystals in the pit of its softest places. Waiting by not waiting for the inevitable ransom. He wonders if a giant, somnolent, sorta-dead juggernaut can lie to itself about that.

If she asks him who he loves, Keith would lie. He's got it ready, packaged from day one, good to go. Say the word, he thinks, watching her watch the stars.

Go on. Say anything at all. He's ready.

Somewhere out there, a Balmera is blooming sources of power. Somewhere either far away, or too close for comfort, something's being made that can never be repaid, no matter how many rituals you bray into the wind. Some things you can't pay for. Some shit you pay for your entire life, and it's just one lifetime if you're lucky and the gods are kind.

Keith drags his helmet on, and heads for his loading bay. Shifts, cursing under his breath, as he strides towards red, not black. He can feel her eyes on him, taking unsympathetic inventory of everywhere he puts his body. He's about to descend when he hears her.

"He's not there."

Keith steps off the platform, but she puts a hand out, throwing up an indifferent, pale-blue blinking screen, broadcasting coordinates and temperatures, possibilities of survival in a place where emptiness intersects void. He notices, maybe for the first time, that her mouth is softer than it seems, too. Don't ask him how he knows. He doesn't. Honest to fucking God. That one isn't a lie.

Pidge sounds more grown-up than he's ever heard her. He's not so convinced it's a good look.

"Don't you think I've done the math?"

Keith doesn't answer.


	2. The Moons of Pluto

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Go on then, Red-Wearing-Black. Try it on me, she thinks, staring him down. I haven't changed colour, inside or out. Let's see who's steadier in their war boots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic will explore + involve consensual underage sex in future chapters.  
> Please treat this a trigger warning if needed. Don't hesitate to take care of yourself in fandom, and outside of it.

It starts the way everything does, with mathematics.

"Statistically, there was no way we could have prevailed on the storm planet. What's worse is that you knew that. What's worse still is that you did it, anyway."

Allura winces, concussed and on edge. They're all on edge. Forming Voltron saves the day, but it only saves part of it. There's still the splitting up to be considered, when the magic (or, the way Katie sees it, the pure mathematics) of fusion fades away, and they're left in their individual lions, in their individual suits of armour. Wearing their own injuries.

The free fall bruises Allura sustained from her tangle with Lotor are already fading, but that isn't the point. Even as the Princess raises her hand, intones, "Pidge, it's alright...", Katie's up on her feet and under Keith's nose before any of the paladins and Coran can call for an armistice over green goo. "No," she says to Allura, keeping her eyes on Keith. "It really isn't."

Their new leader looks her down. There's a small, deep cut in his browline. This close to him, right under him, Katie can smell his sweat and his breath. If she were a fanciful person, she'd imagine she could taste the ghost-trail of the drink he downed before he jumped into the Black Lion and tried to sacrifice them all in one swift, decisive strike to the head.

"Yeah? What's the statistic probability of you shutting the hell up?"

Keith doesn't sound drunk. If anything, he seems more poised post-battle. His eyes are so bright, so focused, they almost seem to sheen wet, the way someone might weep through sheer concentration. She understands that, even as she feels her mouth spreading into a snarl. She's looked at screens and stars long enough to tear up, all her life. 

She doesn't know why she's glad that when she snarls at Keith, feeling her fists ball, her stance shift, he snarls back.

It takes Hunk bodily inserting himself, broad palms gentle against her shoulder and Keith's chest, to break up something nobody wants to see start. There's uneasy laughter, and some leftover cookies, and a detailed rundown of the next cycle's plans of reconnaissance and alliance formation. They might be the biggest, shiniest hope for the universe, but they still need friends. She manages sotto voce goodnights to everyone, feels the curling tension in the flex and surrender of all the muscles in her spine. She needs to build something complex and impossible, then dismantle it. She needs to salvage and strip-mine, root around in the entrails of a disintegrating moon, pull up something precious with a name no one remembers. Give it a new name, in binary and ancient code. Restart it then rip out its heart.

Katie goes to bed that night with no light-shields shuttering her screens. She wants all the skies to bear down on her. She wants everything that has a core of fire for a heart to witness her, to judge her worthy or not. Under her pillow, Matt's journal presses a faint indent into her cheek. She knows that when sleep fizzles out three hours before she should be awake, she'll open it like a confessional, bookmarking it with another loose page from Shiro's logbook. She likes the way his neat, precise cursive looks next to her brother's looped scrawl. She likes that they both used their hands to write, wonders if they knew that about each other on Kerberos. When she finally falls asleep, the journal, peppered with logbook pages like so many pressed lilies, is open to the final entry Matt wrote before he left for mission. He would have met Shiro the following day, on a moon colder than any crypt. They would have shook hands, and one, or both of them, would have smiled. 

She drops Keith in training the first chance she gets. No one sees it coming. Not even, she notes with lip curling delight, him. His back smacks the floor, hard, legs a tangle, holo-shield vanishing to reveal a tight, resentful fist. When she reaches out to tug him back up, he sidesteps her with a swift dart, feints and then grounds her, his knee coming dead centre to pinion her torso. She twists, hears Lance shout, "What the freshly-brewed quiznack?", hears Coran slam the simulation to a halt, virtual Galrans staticking out abruptly. 

"Huh? Guys, c'mon. Maybe no ninja sparring til after second breakfast?" Hunk laughs nervously, rounding up behind them like he isn't so sure he won't have to break between their bodies with the pacific reassurance of his own, again. 

Keith spits as he stands, not bothering to help her up. "I'm out." He seizes his jacket, slings it over one shoulder, and she doesn't see him for three days. 

All she wants to do is reread and reread the journal, but there's work to be done. A war that needs winning in a new way every time she surveys the horizon. Allura knocks at her door every evening, bearing intelligence they've parlayed for or outright stolen, and Katie tries her best to plot it into the known systems they're monitoring. Why isn't it possible to hack the universe? They learn more every cycle, but there's only so far they can go with fresh-minted awareness of the movements of enemy battleships, testimonials from defectors, topography reports from colonized solar systems rich in harvest-ready quintessence. The best Katie can do is to break it down into pure maths for Allura, sit by her side and calculate statistical probabilities, see how much of it makes sense in scientific terms. 

There is an overwhelming possibility that her heart is broken, though she never gave it permission to do any such thing. 

Katie's headed to her quarters to merge the final pages of Shiro's logbook into Matt's journal, when Keith steps into her line of sight. He needs a shave. He needs a shower. He looks to her like he needs a lifetime of sleep, but knows he won't get it unless he steals it from someone who welcomes blackout like a shadowy friend.

"You've been missing," she points out, angry at him for intersecting her doorway, for blitzing her peace with the air-raid reminder of what they've lost. Of what's been lost. The binary of missing, marooned, gone. The uncontestable maths of that. She hates him for the pure science he represents, standing there, looking like he'd just as soon eighty-six her than fight by her side. 

Go on then, Red-Wearing-Black. Try it on me, she thinks, staring him down. I haven't changed colour, inside or out. Let's see who's steadier in their war boots.

"I've been looking. I've been out there, fuckin' looking. What the fuck've you been doing, Holt? Daydreaming? Counting daisies and hoping your prince will come?"

She doesn't think about the percentage of risk involved in shoving him. She just does it, pushing hard into the darkness, feeling his jacket slip and seeing his blade gleam. He gives, shocked and furious, the both of them hurtling in a compact mess into the black space of her bedroom. They stand there, breathing like they've maybe fought, her hands and his an unholy knot, pressing and forgetting how to come apart. 

All she can think is that there's a hundred percent chance you'd die without a suit on Kerberos. She breathes, and blinks, and tries to get more space between them. In the darkness, his eyes are focus-wet. Like he's been gazing too long at the stars.

The moons of Pluto orbit chaotically, she thinks, staring at him. Scientifically speaking, life there would be hard on the heart. 


End file.
